Sunday, January 4, 2009

If you have seen any of my posts about Koloa Landing and the diving conditions lately, you may understand why I ask the question, "why am I an Instructor?" Well, today, I was reminded why. I went to teach the pool lesson at the Hyatt, where I had only one person show up. Well, that was a little dissapointing. However, I was even more dissapointed to learn that they would be leaving in the morning. To make it even worse, the other person that brought the first time diver to the pool lesson was a certified diver (Luigi, from Italy) that did a refresher with me a few days before. He scheduled a dive with another company before arriving in Kauai and did not dive with us. He told me that his dive had been cancelled because of ocean conditions. I am batting .1000 here in the dissapointment department. So Luigi introduces me to Simona. She says that she is excited to try SCUBA. Well, O.K. Here we go. So we go through the lesson and are getting ready to practice. As soon as she put the regulator in her mouth, she began to complain that she felt like she was going to faint. She then spit it out of her mouth and said, "I am going to faint. I cannot do this!" To make a long story short, after about an hour of one-on-one and a lot of encouragement, Simona was successful. Now I did not make any money from this...no one paid me for my time. But the reward came in the success of sharing something I love with someone. You cannot put a price tag on that.